Berlin-based search engine Ecosia has offered to buy Hambach Forest from energy company RWE. The threatened woodland has been the scene of sometimes violent clashes between police and anti-coal activists.
The tech company sent a fax early Tuesday offering over €1 million ($1.15 million) for the remaining 200 hectares of Hambach Forest to the owner, RWE, said Genica Schäfgen of Ecosia.
The offer is valid until October 31.
"We think that such a fair balance of interests between RWE and the population can be found, and are committed to the purchase of the land, in order to pursue environmental and social interests together with organizations that have campaigned for the protection of the forest and have dedicated themselves to nature conservation," Ecosia chief executive Christian Kroll wrote to RWE chief Martin Schmitz.
"We are not commenting on this offer and will not react to it; the offer speaks for itself," an RWE spokesman said, stressing that for the company it was not a matter of the forest but the lignite located under it.
6 years of coal protest coming to an end at Germany's Hambach forest?
Activists have uprooted their lives to save a German forest from being sacrificed to a gigantic coal mine. Now, German police are overseeing the clearing of the Hambach forest as the plans for mining go ahead.
Image: DW/G. Rueter
Primal forest
At the heart of Europe, in western Germany, near the border to France and Belgium, a scrap of ancient forest holds thousand-year-old trees along with abundant wildlife. But there's another species living there in the forest as well — our own.
Image: DW/G. Rueter
Life among the treetops
About 150 people currently live in what's left of Hambach forest, many in makeshift tree houses. Although living in a tree house may appear idyllic, many of the environmental activists have uprooted their lives for the better part of six years — living without electricity and running water — to protect the forest, and take a stance against the power of the fossil fuel industry.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/Bildfunk/C. Gateau
Evictions begin
Several hundred police officers accompanied RWE workers for protection as they visited the forest on Wednesday, September 5, to expel the protesters in preparation for clearing. Although the operation was mostly peaceful, one activist was arrested after resisting police.
Image: DW/I. Banos-Ruiz
Nonviolent resistance
Activists joke about their "dangerous weapons," such as an empty fire extinguisher. Just days before the police action on September 5, Herbert Reul, the interior minister for the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, warned that police and RWE staff in the Hambach forest were dealing with "extremely violent left-wing extremists." Members of the protest group have denied Reul's description.
Image: DW/G. Rueter
Not the first forest confrontation
Over the years, police have clashed with protesters in the Hambach forest. In 2017, police employed pepper spray to disperse protesters in advance of planned logging. The looming eviction is likely to result in the largest confrontation there yet.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/M.Becker
Trees for coal
Here is the result of a recent RWE clearing campaign, which ran from October 2016 to March 2017. In the background, the smokestacks of the Niederaussem power station can be seen. With a CO2 output of more than 29 million tons yearly, this is Europe's third-dirtiest power plant. Due to massive toxic emissions such as mercury and sulfur, it is also considered Germany's second-most-toxic power plant.
Image: Elian Hadj-Hamdi
'Critical turning point' for climate policy
"Clumsy" has lived among the treetops in the Hambach forest since the resistance against the RWE coalmine project began in 2012. He believes the battle over the forest is a critical turning point for German climate policy, and the government's decision is one between "giving in to the lignite hardliners, [or] protecting our life support basis on this planet."
Image: DW/G. Rueter
Small forest with big stakes
Only about 10 percent of the once sprawling Hambach forest has survived the mine's onslaught. What's left appears miniscule in comparison to the vast expanse of the mine, which already covers about 85 square kilometers (33 square miles). But environmentalists say the forest holds enormous ecological value, and is home to abundant and biodiverse ecology, including endangered animal species.
Ever-hungry coal industry
The Hambach mine, located between Aachen and Cologne, is Germany's largest open-cast mine. Here, RWE uses enormous excavators to extract brown coal, also known as lignite, from the earth. Lignite is among the fossil fuels that emit the most carbon dioxide when burned. What remains of Hambach forest is the last bastion in a long battle against the expansion of the mine.
Image: Michael Goergens
Save the forest, save the world
Environmental activists have undertaken nonviolent resistance against the RWE coal mine expansion for more than six years. Through their actions, they claim to not only want to save the Hambach forest from destruction, but also send a message to the world about the dangerous consequences of prioritizing fossil fuel extraction over important ecological sites.
Image: DW/G. Rueter
Global support
Activists from all over the world have supported the action by staying for days or weeks at a time. Over the past six years, activists have literally built up an alternative community within the forest. Although it is still unclear what exactly will happen in the struggle between the protesters and the fossil fuel giant, potential eviction is an ever-present possibility for the forest dwellers.
Image: DW/G. Rueter
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On Friday, an administrative court in the city of Münster ordered a halt to the clearance, pending a review of a complaint brought by the German Federation for the Environment and Nature Conservation (BUND) regarding a protected species of bats.
On Tuesday, RWE offered to reduce the amount of lignite it extracts at the Hambach site by up to 38 percent to between 10 million and 15 million tons per year between 2019 and 2021.
The company has extracted 40 million tons of lignite a year from the site. RWE says it needs fresh supplies of fuel urgently or electricity production will be placed in jeopardy at its lignite-burning plants.
An RWE spokesman said that production could be reduced at two plants between Dusseldorf and Cologne by 9 to 13 terawatt hours this year; last year RWE produced 202 terawatt hours of electricity, 74 of which came from burning lignite.
Ecosia says it has 8 million users. It uses the vast majority of its profits to fund conservation projects, which include planting trees as well as building up a reserve fund, from which the offer for Hambach Forest came.
Ecosia said they based their offer on what RWE's predecessor paid for the land in the 1970s, the equivalent of 500,000 euros.
"Hambach Forest Stays!" Germany and the Coal Industry
